Smedley’s had seen better days. Nestled precariously on the edge of Belgravia, once a respected and lively members’ club for the more daring but frugal of gentlefolk, it had since decayed into a warren of dingy parlours within the sprawling attics of Fothergill House. More senior members, their eyes misty with nostalgia, could tell you how the club had once occupied the whole building before the money ran out and the lower floors were surrendered to bohemian types. The old drawing rooms were now the chintzy shop floors of artisanal bakers, tea emporia, and the more up-market gin palaces and opium bars.
Nevertheless, the club persisted, if only by the stubbornness of its remaining members: too poor, too eccentric, or too set in their ways to move. Amidst its cluttered reading rooms, one could still find solace from the woes that seemed to have gripped the fringes of London society in recent years.
Samuel Gerrit was one such fellow.
At that exact moment, he was whiling away the hours with a game of cards. His variant of patience did not use the standard French deck, however, but an eclectic assortment of worn cigarette cards, each carrying a different portrait of the same aged but handsome face.
The Many Portraits of Vladimir Rurik-Novy, Tsar of Russia, King of Poland-Lithuania, Gurkhan of Mongolia
each picture read, in chipped silver font. They had been all the rage, back when Sam had smoked Howard’s Patented Imperials and Margery, his youngest, had eagerly hoarded the embossed treasures that came with each finely crafted pack. He’d found them, years later, carefully bound together with a pink ribbon, and kept them as a memento of happier times.
Swallowing the lump that was slowly growing in his throat, as his father had taught him all those years ago, Samuel took a moment to steady himself.
Eyeing the arrayed faces of Tsar Vladimir, spread across the pitted mahogany of the table, he took the top card off the deck and flipped it over.
The new miniature showed the monarch bereft of aristocratic garb, dressed instead in a plain black suit, more befitting a clerk than a king. The People’s Tsar proclaimed the accompanying title. Losing himself to the simple rituals of the crude game, Samuel scanned his growing gallery of miniature tsars carefully, searching the cards for duplicates. There was the Defender of the Faith in the full regalia of the earliest tsars. Another card showed him in the lamellar plates of a steppe warlord, whilst its neighbours had him dressed as a wealthy chieftain from the Caucasus, a Polish noble, a master of the sciences, and even a Siberian hunter, complete with Evenk guide and the splayed body of a Siberian tiger.
Of the many faces looking back at him from the table, none mirrored that of the hard-working, cosmopolitan Muscovite in his hand. Satisfied, Sam placed the new card down, next to a Father of the Fleet sporting an eyepatch, missing teeth, and a rough attempt at a parrot—all carefully applied after the fact in blotchy ink.
No pirate, Margery had said, should be without their avian friend.
“He looks tired, doesn’t he?”
The statement snapped Samuel from the game.
Lady Adelaide Worcester flashed him a warm, brittle smile. She could be very quiet when she wanted to be. The corners of Samuel's lips twitched as the woman announced her presence, his mood buoyed by the knowledge that an old friend was by his side, content to inhabit the silence between them.
Her comment, however, had worked its lazy way through the stale air of the attic, the slightest promise of entertainment rousing the aged gentlemen from their seats. Samuel's little ritual was well known amongst the regular patrons of Smedly's; the odd game of patience was hardly the most exhilarating spectator sport, but the rare set of cards, and Sam’s particular rules, nevertheless made it the most interesting activity in the club most mornings.
So, surrounded by what looked—and sounded—remarkably like a small colony of elderly but harmless penguins, he proceeded with his game, doing his best to ignore the encouraging nods and mumbled praise of his unwanted audience. As if his “strategy” was anything more than blind luck and the will of the cards. The suspicions of the milling crowd were right, though. As there were only a few cards left before revealing the full set, if he drew no duplicates, Samuel would win.
He flipped over the next card.
A second People’s Tsar stared up from its resting place on the table.
With an audible groan, Samuel’s audience bled away.
The butler-automata, nearly as obsolete as the members themselves, lurched unsteadily out of the low doorway from the kitchens, the list of its gait sloshing the chef’s soup of the day over the carpet. Oblivious to the clanking contraption, Samuel gazed at the ranks of Vladimirs, his eyes drawn to the tight bands of fissures that cut deep around the tsar’s eyes, a testament to the sovereign’s age and the many burdens of statesmanship. The steady march of years was earnestly captured by the delicate, lithographic linework that formed each portrait. The old monarch’s condition never changed from picture to picture, despite the pantomime of titles, costumes and baubles. His skin was leathery, and his hair sported a delicate lacework of greys and silver. Adelaide had been right; the supreme ruler of the Commonwealth did look tired. The cards were old too, and though he seldom followed the prattle of the gazettes these days, Samuel was certain that the lithographs on the broadsheets showed no improvement in the Tsar’s health in recent years. Evidently, time weakened even the mightiest of figures, with only those who departed too young being spared the withering effects of its march.
As he contemplated this, Samuel's thoughts drifted to the ageing Rurik-Novy and his kaleidoscopic assemblage of roles and costumes. Samuel, who had once marvelled at the beauty and exoticism of the Winter Palace during his time with the British legation in Moscow, had always accepted the image of a strong and united Commonwealth, the message proclaimed from every building each May Day during the victory parades through White Square too overwhelming to be questioned. But now, older and wiser, with the years stripping back the intoxicating glamour of heavily-curated state processions, his listless mind could not help but ponder the contradiction that stared back at him.
How long could a tsar hold together a league of peoples so estranged by distance, history, language and creed? Surely it would not be long before the careful house of cards called the Commonwealth came crashing down? Dismissing such thoughts as trite musings, Samuel began to gather his cards. Far above, a pair of immense, blue eyes—heavy-lidded and yellowed by decades of smoke and grime—watched him stand. The scowling face of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, loomed large over the room, more fresco than portrait, and he felt his chest swell with patriotic pride. The mistress of domains stretching across the world, she seemed immovable, immortal even, as if she would endure long after even Smedley's had crumbled to dust.
Not like Tsar Vladimir.
Samuel had never paused to reflect on what might happen should the Queen ever pass.
A Crown without Queen Victoria was, simply, unthinkable.